Monday 2 May 2022 The Guardian •
3
Moya
Lothian-McLean
I
am part of a generation that is used to living
its life in full view – our collective adolescence
measured in a succession of messaging apps
and social networks. Each of them encouraged
increasing levels of openness and entrenched
the message: that sharing prompts caring
or, better yet, attention. For much of my life,
almost everything became fodder to be shared
online. Funny texts from friends, videos of strangers
on the street, stray thoughts about sexual proclivities.
Privacy, both mine and that of the people I came
into contact with, was a mythical concept. If I had
experienced something, surely that made it my
anecdote, to do with as I pleased? This approach
caused problems. A man I was dating texted me to
ask if a particular rant about bad communicators
was about him (yes, it was). A colleague warned me
about sharing pictures of myself in my underwear,
prompting a furious reaction. Family fractures
resulted from drunk tweets. But why, I would think
defi antly, should I censor myself?
Over the past two years, though, something has
changed: I’ve started to properly pull back, a move
encouraged by the ongoing presence in my life of
someone I love very deeply, whose attitude to privacy
is the antithesis of mine. I had learned to see sharing
as widely as possible as an act of pride. To me, posting
a candid photograph to 10,000 followers was akin to
loudly claiming my beloved for the world to see. He
took a diff erent view: attention from faceless avatars
meant nothing to him. Why, he asked, did I feel
compelled to perform my life for these people?
It was a good question, and one I wasn’t quite
able to articulate an answer to, becoming defensive
at fi rst. Even now, I’m not sure there’s a single way
to understand the drive to broadcast every facet
of my existence. Perhaps the simplest explanation
is that oversharing was a behaviour I learned early- as a toddler, my mother tells me, I would run
around pointing at people and announcing what
genitalia I surmised they had, informed by the iconic
197 3 kids’ sex education book Where Did I Come
From? – and engaging in it resulted in an incredible
amount of positive reinforcement as I grew older.
There are other reasons of course: the realisations
Battersea Park
in London,
April 2021
PHOTOGRAPH:
GUY BELL/REX/
SHUTTERSTOCKand breakthroughs I’ve had since beginning the
process of redrawing my boundaries. But I think
I’ll keep those to myself.
Another factor was starting out as a lifestyle
journalist in the twilight of the 2010s. A fi rst-person
essay boom was in full swing, and leveraging your
personal life was one of the few routes to get noticed
if you lacked contacts or journalism qualifi cations.
Young women desperate to stand out from the
crowd were coaxed into sharing intimate, and often
traumatic, details about their lives in order to get
clicks. In this arena, to lay yourself bare was an act
of ambition – one, we later discovered, that could
be diffi cult to scrub from the internet. Meanwhile,
a new crop of digital-fi rst and reality TV celebrities
had emerged, defi ned by their “authenticity’” and
willingness to present their entire existence for
public consumption. Positive reinforcement for
laying it all on the metaphorical table was high.
Reprogramming yourself is a fascinating exercise.
The urge to share is most insistent when I’m alone,
bringing the horrifi c realisation that, somewhere along
the way, my brain has been trained to process reality
through an audience. Sharing became how I made
my own life real. If a tree fell in a forest and I didn’t
tweet about it, did it even happen? At times, I feel like
something terrible and irreversible has taken place;
that I’ll never be able to walk down a street listening
to a beautiful piece of music and not get the urge to
convert the sheer joy of the experience into a social
media post, or a text to a friend to make it real.B
ut every time I resist that grubby
pull, there’s a small rush of
triumph – and liberation. Now I’ve
had a taste of what keeping things
close feels like, I crave it. It’s a
delicious secret , a reclamation of
power I wasn’t aware I’d surrendered.
Choosing what to share, with who
and when, prompts necessary pauses – do I really
need to mention this detail? Is this information I want
out there, long term? Do I even have the necessary
consent to trumpet a certain story to all and sundry?
None of this means I’ve stopped sharing
altogether. That would be a lonely life indeed.
But I have become far more selective about exactly
what information reaches an audience wider
than my inner circle (and I’m not alone; there is a
burgeoning backlash against oversharing, counting
Taylor Swift among its converts). Last year, I read
the playwright Joe Orton ’s diaries, published after
his murder in 1967. As detailed in John Lahr ’s
introduction to The Orton Diaries, Orton always
intended for posthumous publication of the work
and believed “the value of a diary was its frankness”.
His entries are the last word in confessional writing.
But they were penned safe in the knowledge that the
public would only read them after he was long gone.
As a result, the man who jumps off the page feels
utterly free, for better or worse.
I’m now realising that complete openness was
limiting. Privacy is a cloak under which we are at
liberty to explore the intricacies of the self, beholden
to no audience other than ourselves. I have grown up
in a generation that overshares in order to be heard.
Only through the slow, gruelling process of learning to
be private am I really beginning to listen to myself.I built a life on
oversharing –
until I saw the
joys of privacy
Opinion
n
Sharing
was how
I made my own life
real. If a tree fell in
a forest and I didn’t
tweet about it, did
it even happen?
Moya Lothian-
McLean
is a journalist
who writes
about politics
and digital
culture